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+ captionPaula Cole will play at the Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts in Palmer Lake.

Grammy-winner Paula Cole is grateful for her success in the 1990s. Her two smash hits, "Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?" and "I Don't Want to Wait," took her up the charts and into millions of CD players.

But she's even more grateful to have fallen out of the limelight and to land where she is today. Cole will perform Thursday in a trio at the Tri-Lakes Center for the Arts in Palmer Lake.

"The whole fame thing - I hated the photo shoots and video shoots," she says. "When the music was so popular and the hits were high, I was a hamster running frantically on the wheel. Everybody wanted me to keep working and making money for them. Your personal life atrophied to a point where it wasn't working, and I thought that's wrong."

"Raven," her seventh album, was released in April. It's notable because it's her first fan-funded disc.

"I didn't want to be in a position of putting my fans in an uncomfortable zone," she says. "I did it as lovingly as possible, and they were there for me. If I wanted any promotional budget for the album, I needed help. I'd already spent thousands out of pocket."

Her campaign worked. Fans raised $75,258, more than $25,000 above her goal.

"I'm not pressured into things I didn't want to do," Cole says. "It's a smaller career, but it's managed more adroitly and more economically. It's really about the music now. I've always been known as a fiercely independent musician anyway, and difficult to work with. I didn't want to acquiesce to a record label as to what my music should sound like or who I should play with. I've always been standing up for myself, and it was always difficult. The photo shoots always tried to make me sexier than I was. Now I don't want to deal with that. I'm a woman in my 40s, dammit, I shouldn't have to deal with that."